Come on Myleene

HEARTBURN, constipation and the ghastly prospect of varicose veins are not the usual fodder of celebrity interviews, but these are the subjects that Myleene Klass wants to talk about – and warming to her theme she moves on to morning sickness, hormonal meltdowns and her tips for coping with friction rash."Sorry, but I'm the biggest baby bore in the world!" exclaims the Hear'Say star and classical pianist turned broadcaster and Marks & Spencer model. But first of all, says the 29-year-old new mum – her first baby, Ava Bailey Quinn, was born last August – she must make one thing clear.
"I am not a celebrity," says Klass firmly. "I'm just a normal girl who made good." This is rich, coming from the woman who became the uncrowned Queen of the Jungle in I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here, thus confirming that a career that appeared to be tumbling into freefall was spectacularly back on track. This is also, by the way, a woman whose admirers include Prince Philip. "Crikey, you're fit," he once told her.
Gorgeous chaps such as Johnny Depp, Brad Pitt, George Clooney and Matt Damon stroked her bump and talked babies with her when she was heavily pregnant and coping with a phenomenal workload. Sir Paul McCartney also insisted on touching her tummy, then told her to go home and rest. She did as she was told since Earl Spencer had already offered similar advice.
"Look, I'm just plain, ordinary Myleene – Leenie or Smyles to those who know and love me – from Norfolk. I'm not a star! I think people identify with me because I am so ordinary. I'm certainly not a supermodel, like Twiggy or Erin O'Connor," she says, although few "ordinary" women end up "doing a Demi" (so called after Demi Moore's nude pregnant shoot for Vanity Fair), appearing naked on the cover of a glossy, as Klass did for Glamour magazine, when she was 24 weeks gone.
"OK, I'm kind of famous, well-known, if you like, but all I do is work very, very hard and lead this really middle-aged life. I go home every night, put on my slippers, cook spaghetti bolognese, say, and then it's sheer bliss, the three of us in the bed: Gray, my partner and caveman hero, and our daughter, whose every noise and facial expression absolutely fascinates me. (Before I get letters telling me I shouldn't have her in bed with us, I know, I know, but I can't stop myself!) I can't take my eyes off her. In fact, Gray says I'm her 'stalker-mummy'; I just want to sit and stare at her for hours on end."
If she had known how wonderful it is just being at home in her lovely new, five-bedroom house – ten minutes from her parents' home in north London – with her baby, she would have started having children years ago, she says, giving one of her infectious giggles. Ava goes everywhere with her and would have sat in on this interview today, if Gray were not going away on a business trip. "He's buying a suitcase and he's taken Ava with him because he's going to miss her so much," she grins. "She's the most adorable, most placid, most perfect baby ever!"
Apart from the odd digression into cracked nipples, swollen ankles, baby poo and Ava's gift for projectile vomiting, Klass manages to stop talking about her daughter for just long enough to tell me about her extremely frank diary of her pregnancy, My Bump & Me. Illustrated with lots of very intimate images of said bump, boyfriend and bairn, there is plenty of down-to-earth baby talk, ranging from how long you should go on having sex while pregnant ("I felt really sensuous – and fancied Gray like mad") and whether breast is best ("There's a real bully culture around it, the worst bit being it's women against women.")
Nonetheless, Klass is breast-feeding her daughter after vowing she wasn't the earth-mothering nurturing type. "Ava just 'rooted' – she turned her head towards my breast as she could smell the milk. Now, it seems like the most natural thing in the world," she says, pointing to a picture in her book of her feeding Ava shortly after she was born.
We are in Klass's agent's London offices in Soho. I wait in the foyer as mountains of dresses are hefted around the place – Klass is choosing her frock for the Baftas since she's a red-carpet interviewer before flying to LA for the Oscars, with Ava. Smiley Myleene comes skipping out, dressed in her own clothes: a black-and-white silk polka-dot wrap dress that accentuates her splendid embonpoint and hand-span waist.
She looks fabulous, tall and reed-slim in platform shoes, despite insisting that she has lots of wobbly bits thanks to her pregnancy. Coming over all maternal, she worries that no one is looking after me. "Why haven't you got something to drink?" she asks. A large glass of water appears a moment later.
It is hard to believe that this is a woman who was once so vilified that members of the public would hiss at her in the street. She was not only viciously abused and spat at, she was happy-slapped and sexually assaulted by so-called fans of the ill-fated, manufactured pop band Hear'Say. She knows, she sighs, all there is to know about the double-edged sword of fame – it was poised on a thread over her head ready to slash her down at any moment.
One "fan" pushed her up against a wall until she bled. She even got her face kicked in a couple of times. A shop assistant called her "a bitch" while she was buying a new ironing board at an Oxford Street store. She also acquired a stalker, had two former boyfriends selling their kiss-and-tell stories to the tabloids, and was forced to take out an injunction against someone attempting to blackmail her family.
When the five-strong band, all of them selected in 2001 as winners of ITV's first Popstars talent competition (forerunner of Pop Idol and others), dissolved in bitter tears and recriminations, it was Klass who was blamed for its demise. Her hard-edged "bitchiness", her "huge ego" and "diva-like behaviour" allegedly led to the departure of Kym Marsh, effectively driving the final nail into the group's coffin.
The group was invited on to The Frank Skinner Show to explain what had gone wrong just two years after making history by releasing the fastest selling debut single ever, but Klass's colleagues abandoned her and left her to face the music alone. She broke down in tears on the live show. "I just felt so lonely," she explains, tucking her legs beneath her on the huge scarlet sofa we're sharing, insisting that she doesn't recognise anything of herself in "the bitch from hell".
She survived, she claims, because she's made of stern stuff. The daughter of Oscar, an Austrian navy captain, and Magdalena, a Filipino nurse, she had an idyllically happy home life, with her younger siblings, Jessie and Dan, despite being bullied at school in Gorleston, Norfolk. Her unusual ethnic mix and dark gold complexion meant she did not fit in.
"I used to cover myself in thick, white powder to make myself as pale as everyone else at school. I desperately wanted to be white; I looked like a Goth when I'd finished," she says.
"At school, I knew I looked different, so I was treated like an outcast. They called me a 'Chink' and I was beaten up. They said I was a half-caste, that I must be half-black. You can't be half-black if you're half Filipino; then I was told I was mixed-race – I didn't understand what that meant. But I do know all there is to know about bullying and how to deal with it. I think that really helped me to cope with what happened with Hear'Say and also when living in the jungle."
At school, she threw herself into her academic studies, particularly music and science. Currently studying astronomy with the Open University, she turned down a place to read engineering at Cambridge University and went instead to the Royal Academy of Music where she trained as a classical musician – she plays the piano, harp and violin and never planned to become a pop star, which may explain why she seemed out of place in a band that created surely the most preposterous employment of an apostrophe ever.
After the Hear'Say debacle, however, she bounced back, thanks in no small part to those I'm a Celebrity… shower scenes when she revealed a knockout figure in her infamous itsy-bitsy teenie weenie Rigby & Peller bikini (later auctioned for charity for £7,500 on eBay). Plus, she's a grafter, so she's reinvented herself as a prolific broadcaster, TV presenter and model, winning that six-figure contract to become one of the faces of M&S, as well as a £1m deal with EMI for a series of pop-classical CDs.
We've already had Myleene's Music for Romance and she's just released Myleene's Music for Mothers, on which she plays the piano on Leonard Bernstein's America and Ennio Morricone's Chi Mai. All of the music is the stuff she played to Ava while she was still in the womb during what was a very public, very high-profile pregnancy since the M&S advert featuring her rising like Botticelli's Venus from the waves, ensured that the bikini she was modelling sold out overnight.
"I think it worked because I had curves. Women could identify with me, again because I'm ordinary – if I could wear a bikini when pregnant, then so can any woman. It's been very liberating that M&S has embraced me as a pregnant woman. (She did another shoot for them in Venice when she was eight-and-half-months gone.) I mean 90 per cent of their female customers are mothers anyway," she says.
In addition, she's won yet another lucrative deal to put her name to a new range of babywear, being launched by Mothercare in August – Ava goes to all the board meetings. I've seen the photographs on Klass's phone to prove it, as well as those of Ava with "the girls" – Twiggy, Erin, Laura Bailey et al.
Then there's her Sunday evening radio show on Capital Radio and the Classical FM Breakfast Show, which she presents every weekend. On TV, she's fronted everything from The One Show on BBC1 – she went into labour while working on the live programme – to CNN's The Screening Room. This year she'll host BBC1's New Year Live and there's talk of another TV project, A-Listers Unzipped, in which celebrities would be restyled by Klass using computer wizardry.
Revenge for her must therefore have proved a dish best served cold. "No, not at all," she says, her big eyes widening at the suggestion. Sure, all the awful things that happened to her in the wake of Hear'Say, were painful but she also learnt lessons. "I do think I needed to lighten up," she admits, still refusing to point the finger. There were rumours about how she and Marsh, who went on to appear as barmaid Michelle Connor in Coronation Street, almost came to blows during their many slanging matches. Rumour has it that Marsh thumped Klass. Today, though, Klass insists that they've kissed and made up.
"Kym's up north now, so we don't see each other often, but we text each other all the time with our news, and we're always in touch for birthdays and Christmas. God, life's too short for it to be any other way. We're both mummies so we've lots in common." In addition, she's godmother to fellow band member Suzanne Shaw's son. "I was there an hour after he was born – and I changed his first nappy," she says, adding that now she'd like another five children herself. "Gray's going, 'Oh no! Maybe one…'"
There were other traumas to cope with, too, as Hear'Say imploded. Klass's "fiery" Irish partner Graham (Gray) Quinn, the tabloids revealed, had had a brief teenage involvement with drugs. (She met him when he was Hear'Say's security and touring manager – he now has his own security business discreetly looking after A-listers.) It emerged that when he was 17, he'd been arrested in Ireland in possession of £2,000 of heroin and could technically be said to be on the run. His past did not come as a surprise to her.
"Of course I knew about it – we were his employers and he'd told us at the outset. He held his hands up and he fixed it – and I'm proud of him for that," she says. Quinn, 33, surrendered himself to the Irish authorities and was given a fine, a suspended sentence and a glowing report from the judge – he's patron of the charity Drugsline.
"Gray is simply the best thing to have come out of Hear'Say for me," says Klass. They plan to marry later this year since they both come from Catholic families. First, though, they'll celebrate her 30th birthday in April, and Ava's christening.
"I was brought up not to lie anyway. I pride myself on always telling the truth. Everyone who's read My Bump & Me says, 'Oh, it's so honest!' Of course it is! I wanted to do something none of the million-and-one pregnancy books I'd read does, tell it like it is. The first three months were a nightmare. I became a witch, according to Gray, because my hormones changed me so much; I was this screaming, tearful virago. Also, I gained a huge amount of weight – four stone, because the only way I could stop being sick all the time was eating; I stuffed myself.
"My pregnancy was an often emotional and sometimes very difficult journey. It's changed me in so many ways. I know I said I'm not a celebrity, but I am part of that airbrushed world. However, I can't bear the idea that in the celebrity world everything is so perfect. I would look at my peers and think how everything seemed so simple for them, they looked radiant. I had these huge boobs and hips, permanently erect nipples and a puffy face. I also had hay-dry hair and came out in spots. I certainly wasn't sparkly, shiny, smiley Mylie."
As for her daughter: "I'll work and slave to give her everything, but in the end all I care about is that she's healthy and happy. If she grows up to become a hippy, I couldn't care less. All I want is for her to know that she's loved, deeply, deeply loved."
My Bump & Me: A Candid Diary of a Pregnancy by Myleene Klass is published by Virgin Books, priced £14.99. Myleene's Music For Mothers, is on EMI Classics, priced £11.99.



By JACKIE MCGLONE